Don’t throw that pointy-rimmed, bun-wearing hottie out yet. I don’t know how much I’d trust anything else on this site (looks like it might be involved with the University of Phoenix, you know?), but this list of reasons librarians and libraries are still more important than the internet might be a good lunchtime waster.

The Top Ten–a book of top 10 lists by authors choosing their favourite books. It’s so crazy and incomprehensible it just might work.

Each individual top 10 list is like its own steeplechase through the international canon. Look at Michael Chabon’s. He heads it up with Jorge Luis Borges’s Labyrinths. (Nice: an undersung masterpiece by a writer’s writer.) He follows that up with by Pale Fire by Nabokov at #2. (Hm. Does he really think it’s better than Lolita? Really?) Then with number 3 he goes straight off the reservation: Scaramouche, by Rafael Sabatini. (What? By who?) The whole exercise is an orgy of intellectual second-guessing, which as we all know is infinitely more fun than the first round of guessing.

I suggest keeping it near the can or perhaps in the car to read at traffic lights. Red traffic lights. (Thanks, Peder)

M&S will publish the lovable Conrad Black’s biography of Nixon. (Pot + kettle = black.)

For his upcoming biography of disgraced U.S. president Richard Nixon, Conrad Black is returning to the Canadian publisher that issued his first major biography 30 years ago. It’s also the same publisher with whom Black has had legal entanglements in his long career as businessman, newspaper publisher and author.

Yesterday Toronto-based McClelland & Stewart confirmed it has purchased, for an undisclosed amount, the Canadian rights to The Invincible Quest: The Life of Richard Milhous Nixon, a biography that Black, 62, has been working on for at least the last four years.

With an expected length of 800 pages, the book is to be published in hardcover simultaneously in Canada and Britain in May, with the U.S. edition due in the fall. Both the U.K. publisher, Quercus, and the American, PublicAffairs, published Black’s last biography, the 1,300-page Franklin Delano Roosevelt: Champion of Freedom, in 2003.

Of the expected 800 pages, approximately 650 will be redacted in the interest of US national security.

Here in Canada it’s something of a intellectual national sport to watch and cry as American school boards tuck tail and run from the complaints of fundamentalist Christian parents–banning books to match some sick image of wholesomeness that the average lunchroom table conversation in the same school will debunk. It’s like watching bad television. You’re appalled, but cannot look away.

Yet, we have our own pockets of idiots capitulating to other idiots here. Take Peel Region for instance. Not only is it a stinking industrial wasteland suburb of Toronto where jetfuel and ozone are sure to breed a race of twisted Morlock children, it’s also a bastion intolerance and ignorance.

Peel’s Catholic board has pulled the award-winning novel Snow Falling on Cedars from high school library shelves after one parent complained about its sexual content.

Officials say they have not banned the 1995 novel, but that it won’t be accessible to students until a review by a board committee is complete.

The novel, which won the PEN/Faulkner award and the American Booksellers Association book of the year award, contains a few explicit passages, including a detailed description of a married couple’s first sexual encounter, as well as sexual relations between two youths.

Snow Falling on the Cedars?!? I … I can’t even begin… I’ll let commentator Shari Graydon from the article get the last word. She could have a job here at Bookninja with comments like this: “Removing thoughtful fiction from the school library is like taking mashed potatoes out of the cafeteria when the problem is french fries at McDonald’s.”

Heirs of Hugo not victors. M. Hugo’s descendents have been fighting to keep a Les Mis sequel from seeing covers. They’ve lost.

The great-great-grandson of Victor Hugo said yesterday he was bitterly disappointed after his six-year battle to ban a modern sequel to Les Misérables was ended by France’s highest appeal court.

But he vowed to continue fighting to protect what he described as his family’s “moral rights” to the classic work.

“I believed we were fighting the good cause but the court decided otzherwise. It is very, very disappointing,” Pierre Hugo said. “I am not just fighting for myself, my family and for Victor Hugo but for the descendants of all writers, painters and composers who should be protected from people who want to use a famous name and work just for money.” Mr Hugo, 59, a goldsmith, has been fighting to have banned Cosette ou le Temps des Illusions (Cosette or the Time of Illusions), written by journalist François Cérésa. He had demanded £450,000 damages, claiming the publishers had betrayed the spirit of his ancestor’s work to make money.

Dudes (excuse me, “les dudes”), you can’t seriously think this will impact the greatness of the original work, can you? I can see your desire to protect the family legacy, but there are reasons copyrights expire. Let this new work stand on its own and see whether it’s remembered as a valuable contribution or a humorous footnote.

Novelist, dead at 89.

Female crime writers are put the lie to the idea of a “gentler sex”.

Female crime writers are no less brutal than their male counterparts. Mo Hayder’s The Treatment, for instance, features a deranged killer who forces a man to rape his own child; Red Dahlia by Lynda La Plante is a story about the torture, murder and dismemberment of several young women; and Two Women, the book that catapulted Martina Cole to international success, contains some of the most graphic scenes of domestic violence I have ever read.

Given my work as a feminist activist and writer, you might expect me to hate the crime genre. I have spent the whole of my adult life fighting male violence, and much of my work involves researching topics such as rape, child sexual abuse, pornography and murder. I talk regularly to women who have survived sex attacks, and have had to look at crime-scene photographs showing mutilated corpses of women who have been raped, tortured and murdered. It was as a direct result of the hideous brutality of a serial killer – Peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper – that I became a feminist in the first place. Yet, when it comes to fiction, the serial killer genre is my favourite.

It’s funny, as long time readers will know, I am married to a culture, gender and sexuality sociologist–a strong feminist with a great grin and a withering raised eyebrow. She’s utterly practical about the line between theory and reality, but can be ideologically unforgiving, especially when stupidity is involved. Yet she too loves crime and mystery novels.  I think it’s an academic thing. What’s with that? She reads a wide range, on the rare occasion she has time, but the last few years it’s been Laurie R. King. Some beekeeper lady. She devours them whole in an afternoon. I guess after years of reading a page of deep theory a minute, it must only take seconds to follow a narrative. Makes it easy for Xmas and birthday gifts, though.

If you’re looking for a practical, hands-on course to help you sharpen your burgeoning practice of fiction, Bookninja Magazine Editor Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer will be teaching Short Fiction II this winter at U of T.

This is a workshop for budding writers with short stories they want to share and improve. Classes combine instruction on the basic elements of fiction: plot, character, point of view and language, alternated with short, timed writing exercises for cutting through blocks and summoning inspiration. One hour of each class is devoted to workshop time, where individual stories are shared and critiqued. Receive individual and constructive feedback in a fun and supportive environment.

This is a space for the writer who wants to open the tool box, figure out how things work, and maybe get the perspective of others on their work so far. The course is required for the Creative Writing Certificate at U of T, and workshop participants can submit their work to the university’s creative writing awards. Course starts very soon, so sign up now.

An exhibition in Madrid revisits the days of the Spanish Civil War, which spawned a new kind of personal, eye-witness battlefield journalism. I guess we would call them “embedded” today.

The writers and foreign correspondents who came to Spain invented a new kind of war journalism, reporting in first-person, eyewitness accounts the brutal feel of the battlefield.

Their two-and-a-half-year chronicle became something more, an intimate encounter with the great ideological battles of the time: between church and state; rich and poor; the aristocracy and the classless; democracy and fascism.

A traveling exhibition organized for the inauguration of the new headquarters of the Cervantes Institute in Madrid commemorates that journalism with original news clippings from publications as different as Esquire and Pravda. Titled “Correspondents in the Spanish Civil War 1936-1939,” it is part of a vast soul-searching throughout Spain over the terror of the 1936 uprising and civil war that brought General Franco to power and kept his dictatorship in place until his death in 1975. The exhibition, which runs until Feb. 25 in Madrid, was shown last year at the institute’s New York offices and in Lisbon. It will travel next to three cities in France, two cities in Poland and one each in Stockholm and Moscow.

“The best writers came to tell the world what was happening in Spain,” said the exhibition’s curator, Carlos Garcia Santa Cecilia, a former journalist. “They felt a compulsion to be here, to bear witness, to fight for their beliefs. It was the first time journalists said, ‘I must write what I see, what I feel.’”

Some of this appears in Dennis Bock’s amazing novel The Communist’s Daughter — with Bethune leaving the conflict and it’s mess there to bring his services to the people of China during the earliest years of Mao. Bethune comes across several of these travelling reporter types who seem hellbent on telling the story at the risk of their own lives (mind you, you also see that many of them set off with the story already written and are looking for the visuals to back it up).

Profiled at the CBC.

Does more art go into translating Harry Potter than went into writing it in English? (That’s what we call a loaded question revealing editorial bias.)

Of the 325 million Harry Potter books sold around the world, some 100 million copies don’t contain a single line of JK Rowling’s prose. They’re mediated by the work of other writers who set the tone, create suspense and humour, and give the characters their distinctive voices and accents. The only thing these translators have no impact on whatsoever is the plot, which of course is Rowling’s alone.
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Another reason the Potters are a more complicated translation prospect than most books is the contractual requirements imposed by the film company, Warner (for whom questions like the stability of the characters’ names have some impact on their merchandising plans); there have been cases of translators objecting to Warner’s terms, and finding themselves replaced between one book in the series and the next.

I included that last paragraph as a reminder for all the folks who advocate on Harry’s behalf as a literacy tool for kids. Just remember, it’s not about the language, it’s about the toys.

Author interviews are important sales tools, but history shows them to be important literary records as well.

When did what writers say in interviews become at least as important as what they actually write? If readers once pried at their paragraphs looking for revelations, they are now more likely to graze their quips in some magazine—”Twenty Questions” in the New York Times Magazine. Gertrude Stein—herself no mean quipster—rebuked Ernest Hemingway by saying, “Remarks are not literature,” but like many such bons mots, hers doesn’t quite hold up. The author interview, which has truly come into its own in the last century (in antebellum America, newspaper interviews were reserved chiefly for convicted criminals), might be best thought of as a literary genre, with its tone, rhythm, and themes all as intentionally crafted as a poem’s or essay’s. Ironically, it was Stein who managed to suggest that the question-and-answer game could conjure poetic complexity. Upon arriving in America for a lecture tour in 1934, she impressed reporters with her verbal lucidity. “Why don’t you speak the way you write?” one asked. Her riposte: “Why don’t you read the way I write?” The sizable disquisition on cognition, language, and aesthetics that might be unpacked from that breezy reply suggests at least one reason why, these days, the talk writers talk lives on after them.

The question comes in the wake of the proliferation over the past several years of writer interviews in almost every journalistic venue, but especially in literary publications (Bookforum included). There’s barely a literary quarterly or arts magazine that doesn’t publish one or more interviews per issue.

Hopefully readers of the future will have special software to edit all the “like”s, “you know”s and “true dat”s out of this generations babbling. (Thanks, F)

Doctor Zhivago was a CIA-funded cold war propaganda op.

Into one of the most sordid episodes in Russian literary history, the Soviets’ persecution of Boris Pasternak, author of “Doctor Zhivago,” a Russian historian has injected a belated piece of intrigue: the CIA as covert financier of a Russian-language edition of the epic novel.

Ivan Tolstoy, who is also a broadcaster for Radio Liberty and Radio Free Europe, writes in a forthcoming book that the CIA secretly arranged for the publication of a limited Russian-language edition of “Doctor Zhivago” in 1958 to help Pasternak secure the Nobel Prize in Literature that year.

“Pasternak’s novel became a tool that was used by the United States to teach the Soviet Union a lesson,” Tolstoy said in a telephone interview from Prague, where he works as a Russian commentator for the U.S. government-funded radio stations. The novelist knew nothing of the CIA’s action, according to Tolstoy and the writer’s family.

Remember the good old days when they were just looking into other peoples’ business…? Oh, wait, there were never any good old days with the CIA, were there.

Profiled at Bookforum. Sometimes just hanging around gets you in with your heroes as Edward Mendelson discovered when he found himself Auden’s literary executor.

Edward Mendelson was an aspiring undergraduate poet when he first met W. H. Auden. A teacher told him that Auden held an office hour of sorts every afternoon and advised him to look the poet up. Sure enough, there was Auden in the phone book, at an address on Saint Mark’s Place in New York City. “I called up and invited myself over,” Mendelson said. The poet spoke kindly to him, he recalled, but for his part he was “too shy to say anything.”

Several years later, Mendelson met the poet again. He was by now a young English professor at Yale and an Auden expert in the making, thanks in part to a photocopying fund at his graduate department at Johns Hopkins. “I’d Xeroxed all of Auden’s prose,” he said. “I just had it around.” He was assigned to be Auden’s chaperone on a visit the poet made to Yale. When word got out that Auden was looking to assemble a collection of his essays but couldn’t remember everything he’d written, Mendelson—no longer so shy—piped up. “I said, ‘Well, I have it all in my apartment.’ And I left him there for a few hours. He was obviously deeply pleased to be taken seriously.

(From Ed)

Profiled at the Guardian.

Last June, a journalist phoned Ibrahim Nasrallah and asked him how it felt to face a host of charges concerning national security. It was the Jordanian-Palestinian writer’s first warning that he was facing prosecution.

“I was completely shocked,” he says. “I did not know how to respond. All I could think of at that moment was that I needed to finish the book I was working on before things got worse. But I was unable to continue writing. I was confused and angry and also afraid.”

The charges related to his fourth collection of poetry, Nu’man Yastariddu Lawnahu (Anemone Regains Its Colour). These highly figurative poems, first published in 1984, were suddenly banned, while the poet himself faced charges of insulting the state, inciting dissension and reporting inaccurate information to future generations.

Like putty on those nail holes in your wall, a new generation of suckers booksellers lines up at the gates of the slaughterhouse intellectual freedom to take your niche to the next level… um… crack?

The swan song of the independent bookstore has been sung – and then sung again. In a bookselling climate dominated by the Internet and chain stores, even the most persistent redoubts are reportedly packing up. Certainly the numbers bear this out. Membership in the trade organization for independently owned bookstores has dropped by more than half in the past decade.

Yet new stores continue to open. “We’re like Mark Twain” (who lived long after he was mistakenly reported dead), says Oren Teicher of the American Booksellers Association (ABA). “Rumors of our death are premature.”

In 2005 the ABA registered 90 new stores. Last year there were 97, spanning the country from tiny, two-store towns to bursting metropolises. It’s a recent shift, and one that should be heartening for famished bookworms. But it leaves one wondering, even worrying, about these novice booksellers, so new to a business where 2 percent is often considered a good margin of profit. Are they blinded by their love of books, harboring romantic dreams of earning a living? Is there even room in the cultural landscape for the independent bookstore? Is it worth the risk?

Good luck to you all, and may the force market be with you, rather than pressing you down and out. And once you dry, remember to sand.

What do you put in that space at the top of the manuscript that reads “Untitled”? One kind of title will sell and another won’t. In her Guardian blog, Meg Rosoff wittily considers the options.

I’m thinking of calling my next novel Sodomised Roughly by Pirates.

OK, it’s kind of a desperate measure. But the book is just about finished, edited, and out of my hands. I’ve tied up the plot, the characters ring true, the ending makes even me cry. People are starting to read it. My PR is desperate to build buzz. And at the moment, this deathless work of prose is called (wait for it): Great Title Goes Here.

I says, Arrrrr, Meggy. It’s funny, I spent the last four years writing a book with a title I chose early on. The title was a done deal as far as I was concerned. Then the book evolved and it didn’t really fit anymore, but it was like renaming your child at age four.  Neither easy nor kind. In the last days before I sent it to my new publisher, I changed the title. And despite the fact that I sometimes still think of the book under its old title, as does my editor, I’m told,  I’m immensely relieved that I did.

A Melbourne creative writing student rails against creative writing courses and their armies of half-wit graduates. The article has its own ratio of cliches and whatnot, besides a  self-righteous tone and a complete lack of perspective on the irony at hand — you’re TAKING a creative writing course. And it’s not your first! It’s one in a series.

EVERYWHERE I turn, it seems, I see advertisements for writing courses, writing workshops, writing weekends, writing holidays. All of them promise to help participants polish their prose and carve out their characters.

It should be stopped. The only people writing should be those who must write, I scrawl in a notebook as I sit on the side of the running bath while my young son makes duck noises at me.

There is no shortage of people who can, with a little encouragement, write. There are lots of skilled craftspeople. Even more say they want to write, and many of those find their way into university courses, adult education or privately run seminars on the novel, genre, short story and importance of plot. Some can write like angels from the outset, others can’t write at all, as I’ve heard for myself in classes I’ve attended.

This multiplicity of courses promises a way forward, a way into print, possibly even that chimera, a writing career. But desire and training don’t equal genius or that je ne sais quoi that allows a writer to connect, to slip refractive glasses over a reader’s eyes, to say, “see this”. They don’t give the writer something to say that can be said in no other way.

What they do is provide toolboxes, and with those toolboxes the vaguely talented often turn out the equivalent of high school carpentry projects: a procession of by-the-numbers breakfast trays and carved wooden animals.

Lady, everyone in that course thinks of you exactly like you think of them. You’re in a playpen from which perhaps only one of you (more likely none) will ever climb. And that’s okay. Just look at the pretty dials on the walls and fill your pants over and over. It’s a good life. And remember, if you do get out of the playpen, then it’s time to figure out how to get out of the living room. Oh, why do I bother? Okay. Got it. Writers are rubber ducks with glasses on breakfast trays.

A battle rages over the bubbling labs tables and cluttered writing desks of the nerd world. Statistics on slap fights and chemically reckless boobie traps rise sharply. Dark clouds envelop the hallowed corridors of the mind (from which frazzle-haired, soot-covered geeks emerge wide-eyed, waving their arms wildly and coughing). The science book publishers of the world don’t want you to have free access to the latest research on muons, gluons and I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter-ons. GLAVIN!

The battle over public access to scientific literature stretches back to the late 1990s when Nobel Prize winner Harold Varmus began plans for PubMed Central–a repository for all research resulting from National Institutes of Health (NIH) funding–and, a few years later, launched the Public Library of Science (PLoS). These easily accessible journals and repositories have struck fear into the hearts of traditional publishers, who have enlisted the “pit bull” of public relations to fight back, reports news@nature.

The Professional and Scholarly Publishing Division of the Association of American Publishers hired Eric Dezenhall, head of Dezenhall Resources, a PR firm that specializes in “high stakes communications and marketplace defense,” to address some of its members this past summer and potentially craft a media strategy. Dezenhall declined to comment for this article, citing “our longstanding policy due to strict confidentiality agreements neither to identify our clients nor comment on the work we do for them,” in an email response to a request for an interview. But “nobody disagrees on the goals of high-stakes communications–sell a controversial product, win an election, defuse conflict and so forth,” Dezenhall notes in the “manifesto” on the firm’s website. “The life-or-death public relations struggles facing businesses today are not about information they are about power.” In this case, the struggle is over access to scientific information.

Author John Barlow’s trying something new for his book Intoxicated – a cryptic, yet humorous, teaser video on YouTube. Dude, it beats getting your ass handed to you in a boxing match. Here’s to innovation. (You had me at the pic of the ewe with the train in the background…)

What do you do if you have trouble writing a novel? Turn to the computer! Oh, great and wondrous machine that rules my mornings and afternoons and haunts my slumber’s dreams! Impart your wisdom in a barrage of retina destroying photons!

EVERYONE HAS A NOVEL IN them. And that’s exactly where most of them should keep it. In truth, most people have a public information book in them. Written by Mormons, and with spelling mistakes.
…
So, what to do if you’ve got ideas, but are (like me) easily distracted, disorganised and find the prospect of writing an entire novel only slightly less daunting than embarking on an Arctic expedition wearing nothing but Bermuda shorts and with a sachet of Angel Delight your only sustenance?

Previously, the only alternative was the celeb route (taken by Jordan and Naomi Campbell) of getting someone else to do it for you: fine examples of what can be achieved with 100 PAs at 100 laptops for 100 minutes. But now there’s something for the rest of us: a computer program called NewNovelist that claims to “break down the novel-writing process into small, manageable tasks so even the most inexperienced writers can write a novel”. Great: plot arcs by Windows XP. I decided to give it a go.

The opening screen makes it sound so easy: there are only five stages, it tells me, to writing a novel. That’s the same amount of stages as the washing-up. In your face, Pynchon.

Five steps, eh? I knew most of my pals were shitty at math, but this really puts the boots to them. You suckers, spending all that time “crafting”.

The British Library is facing cuts so deep they may have to start charging fees for use. Um, at that point aren’t they less a library and more a “store”?

The prospect has angered senior figures from the worlds of politics, academia and publishing. Among those supporting the library are the author Margaret Drabble, the broadcaster Lord Bragg, Michael Palin, who is a patron, the historian and presenter David Starkey, the poet laureate, Andrew Motion, and the playwright Ronald Harwood.
…
Drabble, who is currently using the library for research, said: “It would be a very great mistake to make cuts. It is a national institution and is used by scholars from all over the world.”

Palin said: “I feel extraordinarily fortunate to live within exploring distance of the British Library. This is one of the great storehouses of world culture, and what I have seen of their archive material, both photographic and written, is quite dazzling.”

While the concensus is this is a difficult year for spending (they have the Olympics coming), people aren’t taking it lying down, but rather propped on pillows in the day bed with a good Earl Grey and a monocle quivering with barely restrained miff. Damn, these people need a good refresher of French blood. Go burn something!

Rachel Seiffert, profiled at the Guardian, talks about writing and promoting books that get you down.

In the year or so after her Booker-shortlisted debut The Dark Room was published in 2001, Rachel Seiffert woke up every morning feeling sad. Not because Peter Carey’s True History of the Kelly Gang had deprived her of the prize – she actually claims to have been relieved not to have won (”I’m not very good at hoo-ha”). But because she was on a long promotional tour publicising the book, which tells the story of three Germans struggling to come to terms with the Nazi legacy, and spending all day, every day, thinking and talking about genocide on a barely imaginable scale. “It took me a while to work out why I was sad all the time, and then it occurred to me that if you begin each day getting up and talking about the Holocaust over breakfast with someone you’ve never met before, it’s no surprise you feel low,” she says now.

Well-fed poets: do they make good poetry?

Shapiro (1913-2000) had gotten the title for his book at a party, after giving a reading in Seattle, when Theodore Roethke called him a “bourgeois poet.” The question is why it caused Shapiro such severe unrest that he poured heart and soul into what is really one very long poem?

I suspect Shapiro’s evident misery started early in his life with a heroic notion of the poet. Any poet knows that to become immortal all you have to do is write a single great poem. This is unlikely indeed. Perhaps there are tens of thousands of mules and draft horses across the countryside who dream of winning the Kentucky Derby. Better yet, a bartender in Seville told me last March, “We have thousands of aspiring Lorcas but only one Lorca.” Very early on a poet is struck by the cruelty and lack of democracy in the arts — so few get it all, and the hordes receive nothing but the pleasure and pain of an overdeveloped consciousness. Ted Kooser, the former United States poet laureate and a friend of Shapiro’s at the time “The Bourgeois Poet” was written, told me Shapiro was obsessed with the French symbolist poets. This explains a lot, since Shapiro’s notion of what a poet was implies the outsider, the outcast, the outlier, one who purposefully deranges his mind to write poems like Rimbaud, or one who could not walk, so borne down was he by his giant wings, to paraphrase Baudelaire. I must here imagine myself an English department chairman, who has to deal with these troublesome creatures, and say that a poet is hubris through and through in the same manner that an unruly pig is solid pork.
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Historically, of course, the scales are tipped in favor of the non-bourgeois poet. Yeats warned that the hearth was more dangerous for a poet than alcohol. Rilke said, “Only in the rat race of the arena, does a heart learn to beat.” Well off the margins of the page in “The Bourgeois Poet” there’s an invisible Greek chorus singing, “You’ve got to earn a living.”

I’m not a big fan of the Amway scheme that is the MFA pyramid in the US–and I can see an argument being made about dulled senses, yadda yadda–but I don’t see anything wrong with someone making a living. You can have it all, Mr Stevens, can’t you? Mr. Williams? Lord Gordon?

I guess if the goal is to achieve fame and be remembered, it’s best to stay skinny, hang out with rock stars and shiver a lot, but if the goal is to have a life in which you can work towards besting yourself, I don’t think you can beat quiet and a good roof. Do you think of poetry as a round-robin tournament or as a game of chess played against an old book and an empty seat?

Ed has a note up for an author who is threatening to sue him for something a commenter wrote on his blog. Thank god we don’t live in so litigious a society, or I bet I’d have been strung up long ago for something one of you guys did. You know who you are.

To Edward Champion / host of edrants.com,

It has come to my attention that your website has posted damaging and incorrect information about me as an author and my book on Kenneth Anger as solicited to you by a Mr Dagan of Berlin, whose accusations have proven to be fictitious, ie source material from authors who are duly credited.
http://www.edrants.com/?p=4023
I strongly urge you to remove it at your earliest convenience to avoid legal action against you. If the reference to me and the book are not removed by the end of the week, you will be hearing from my lawyers in Los Angeles.

Thank-you in advance,

Alice L Hutchison

Eds response tickles me to no end, mostly because he’s telling her to fuck off and get a life. But seriously, I try to encourage people to keep commentary above the belt, but every now and then a whacko gets through the grid (you know who you are… actually, you probably don’t). If something potentially libel comes in, what should the proper response be? Leave it until it’s noticed (when the damage might already be done) or quietly delete it and search for good karma in other places? In the end, my maxim about ignoring critics might have served Ms. Hutchinson well. Critics and accusations come and go in an instant, but a good dust-up draws a crowd and has legs.

At first I thought this must have something to do with dark, cramped rooms full of knick-knacks and doilies, but it turns out it’s an exhibit stateside.

None of the other authors represented in “Victorian Bestsellers,” a new exhibition at the Morgan Library & Museum, had much reason for complaint, either. Organized by John Bidwell, who oversees the Morgan’s department of printed books and bindings, this exhibition of manuscripts, first editions, drawings, posters and prints is not a typical bibliophilic display of rare esoterica. Indeed, its focus is rare exoterica: these books publicly erupted onto the 19th-century English scene. Apart from the Bible’s privileged monopoly as a must-read, these best sellers were among the first cultural products for a broad public, breaking down boundaries of class and caste; they also created new audiences, inspiring spinoffs and extravagant commercial enterprise.

South of the border. There are some Canadian casualties too.

More than 130 independent publishers across the country were hurled into financial crisis on Dec. 29 with the bankruptcy of the parent company of Publishers Group West, the Berkeley firm that distributes books from much of the small press world.

Among them are more than two dozen Bay Area publishers whose works range from Dave Eggers’ novels and Deepak Chopra’s inspirational writings to business books, Buddhist books and the “Here Comes the Guide” wedding planning book.

The bankruptcy hit these small presses at the worst possible time — when Publishers Group West was holding onto its sales revenues from the three months before Christmas, its most profitable time of the year.

Imagine your book rocketting up the charts — 30 years after it was first published. Now THAT’s a long tail.

“Russian Thinkers,” a 1978 collection of essays on 19th-century Russian intellectuals by the philosopher Isaiah Berlin, has virtually disappeared from bookstores across the city, including Barnes & Noble, Labyrinth Books and Shakespeare & Company. The Internet is not much help either: the book is sold out on bn.com, and though it can be ordered from Amazon, the order won’t be shipped for two or three weeks.

The culprit behind this Berlin craze turns out to be none other than Tom Stoppard and his epic three-part play, “The Coast of Utopia,” which opened at Lincoln Center on Nov. 27. Tucked deep inside the show’s playbill is a list titled “For Audience Members Interested in Further Reading,” with “Russian Thinkers” at the top.

So, you just have to get an A-list playwright to put you in the program. Now that we have a recipe for success, it’s just a matter of kidnapping all the ingredients necessary… Excellent…

Several outlets are carrying this wire story on Because She Can, a novel based on the scuzzy adventures of Judas Regan. It’s a horror story/social satire with elements of a Greek tragedy. I particularly like the part where she loses her eyes to OJ’s ice cream spoon-wielding children. It’s the latest in a run of books exposing the seemy underbelly of the publishing world. And by “underbelly” I mean “entire body”. (No, no. I know most of you are hard-working honest folk who are too tired from the battle to even think about stabbing your coworkers in the back, much less use the limited edition Rambo II survival knife with compass and matches in the hilt that you bought on eBay specifically for that task…)

Clark, 29, worked for 11 months as an editor at ReganBooks before leaving at the end of 2004. She quickly put together a manuscript about the publishing business; what she calls a “coming of age novel disguised as a ‘boss from hell’ story”.

In Because She Can, Iowa native Claire Truman is an idealistic young editor who leaves the old-fashioned confines of Peters & Pomfret for better pay and more responsibility at Mather-Hollinger, where she will work under the notorious Vivian Grant. Claire’s professional and personal life are soon ravaged by Vivian, who harasses her at all hours, at all volumes.

But, of course, Vivian is not Judith Regan. “The character from Vivian Grant really is a composite,” Clark said. “There is nothing directly lifted from life in the book.”

Then again, Claire and Clark would have a lot to talk about.

Opposing viewpoint on the value of bitchiness to be found here. Though I would like to point out a distinct divide between bitchiness and immorality.

For those of you who actually care about these sorts of things, today is If It’s Not Scottish It’s Crap day. So here are some misc poetry and Scots links.

• Guardian quiz on Scottish lit (I got 10/13)
• More than you ever wanted to know about Haggis
• New Sara Coleridge poems discovered

The Quill points to Esquire magazine’s Napkin Project where they mailed 250 napkins to writers of varying repute and asked them to do as they pleased. (Canada’s wunderkind Sheila Heti was one of the respondees and writes a cryptic, funny vignette.)

It’s an old story, we figured. Someone, in a bar somewhere, scribbling on a napkin in the failing afternoon light; the kind of story or list or note that might be crammed in a pocket and pulled out years later to tell something deep and forgotten — perhaps life’s most intimate first chapter, nearly lost forever. So we gave this spontaneous medium a shot. We put 250 napkins in the mail to writers from all over the country — some with a half dozen books to their name, others just finishing their first. In return, we got nearly a hundred stories. We present a sampling here — from lush to spare, hilarious to terrifying.

Can the poet contest be far behind? Yes. Sigh.

Toronoto’s eye weekly’s cover story is on the trials, tribulations and triumphs of indie magazines.

The impression that small magazines are bigger than they actually are is quite common. Every once in a while, progressive teen magazine Shameless receives resumés from writers looking for paying jobs, but, like Spacing, the enterprise is still volunteer-run.

“People definitely assume that we have an office,” says Melinda Mattos, who started the magazine with Nicole Cohen in 2003. “I often jokingly refer to Shameless headquarters, but Shameless headquarters is wherever we happen to be sitting at the time.”

The problem here is not necessarily that neither Spacing nor Shameless have office space, or that we aren’t thrilled to be darlings of the press. It’s that, like so many other seemingly successful independent magazines in Canada (see: Maisonneuve, This Magazine, Kiss Machine, Broken Pencil and the now defunct, but sorely missed Lola), there is a gap between how much we’re loved and the financial support we receive in return for what we do. When publishing your own magazine takes up almost all your free time, the awards you receive, the readers you inspire and the influence you wield will only keep you going for so long. The issue here is sustainability – if you don’t eventually receive a paycheque for your work, burnout sets in, and when that happens, magazines that fill those gaping holes left by mainstream media run the risk of extinction.

A TinTin exhibit in honor of Hergé’s 100th, is burning up Paris.

Hergé – his nickname comes from the French pronunciation of his initials in reverse – would have been 100 this year (he died in 1983), and the Pompidou has used the centenary as an opportunity to examine his life and work in a free display. The show is proving immensely popular, so, if you’re planning to drop by during a Parisian break, make sure you allow enough time to queue.

The wait is worth it: once inside, the display is a delight. Stencilled on to the floor and pillars of the Pompidou’s cavernous interior are the coloured stars that twirl above characters in the comic strip who’ve been thumped over the head, as well as snippets of Captain Haddock’s sozzled insults, tagged on the museum’s surfaces like the graffiti of a raging old soak: “Flibustier! Végétarien! Pacte-à-quatre!”; “Arlequin! Hydrocarbure! Zoulou!”

The living dead of the book world.

Powell’s Bookstore co-owner Brad Jonas is standing among 50,000 books collected in three cavernous convention rooms and informs me — with his usual bearish grin — that he has located my book, Unveiled: The Hidden Lives of Nuns. Normally I’d be impressed with such ferreting, but this is the 16th annual Chicago International Remainder & Overstock Book Exposition. No author wants to find her book here.

Welcome to the used car lot of the book world or — as I see it — the publishing world’s version of limbo, the waiting ground for books in between bookstore and pulp fire pit. These books are either overproduced, undersold or their publishers just want to clear their warehouses for newer, flashier models. With stacks piled across the vast expanse underneath the Michigan Avenue Hilton, this is the largest remainder book sales convention in the world.
…
As we pass through the aisles, I spot best-selling literary authors like Carol Shields and Ursula K. LeGuin. There’s even candy for the masses like Madonna: An Intimate Portrait. Among the piles, I was surprised to see Danny Pearl: A Mighty Heart by Marianne Pearl, which is being made into a movie starring Angelina Jolie. How could this book not command an audience? Jonas explained that the publisher probably wanted to publish a new version with movie clips on its cover. So the older versions are dumped on the secondary market of used books. There are also “hurt” books here — books that were damaged in some way, whether it’s a slight tear or a bent jacket.

This reads in parts like a tour of the underworld, received by a horrified, wide-eyed innocent and conducted by a shrouded death-like figure pointing at all the lost souls.

January 27, mark it on your calendars. Turn off Dora and read something with your child. I’m preaching to the converted here, aren’t I?

30 books are up for the National Book Critics Circle Awards. Their blog will be highlighting a book a day running up to the award announcement.

Neal Pollack’s book on keeping his cool while parenting, along with other trendy parenting outlets, gets worked over, mostly body shots to the kidneys and ribs, by Andre Mayer at the CBC.

These folks come across as wisecracking test subjects in mankind’s first experiment with procreation.

People used to raise kids with a sort of quiet stoicism; the fact that humans have been reproducing for millions of years was enough to humble any new breeder. But in this era of unfettered narcissism, child rearing has become a spectacle. The tabloids stalk famous females in search of a “bump” to monopolize the news cycle; Tom Cruise buys his pregnant wife a $200,000 US ultrasound machine for home use; and Oprah exalts celebrity mothers as though having a child is as novel and courageous as space travel. And non-celebs? They bloviate in blogs.

It’s the age of full disclosure, but also the age of prolonged childhood. Due to societal changes — particularly greater permissiveness in the workplace — people are no longer obliged to grow up. They show up at the office in the sort of garb they wore in middle school: sneakers and a hoodie. An astute cover story in New York magazine termed this generation “grups.” (The word was cadged from a classic Star Trek episode in which the Enterprise crew discover a planet run by children.) Procreative grups don’t let parenthood thwart their cool; in fact, they feel compelled to fashion their offspring into equally cool individuals.

Interesting subject here. Thanks to my cool, urban-Dad pal Angus, I read Canadian David Eddie’s book Housebroken and found it amusing and charming. It was mostly anecdotal pieces about muddling through rather than any particular parenting philosophy (other than “schedule your time” — advice I’ll definitely take if there’s a next time). And that’s what it really is, I suspect, for everyone who doesn’t have a million relatives nearby and who can’t afford a nanny. Just a bunch of events that make a life.

Angus and I could both have been candidates to write a book like Pollack’s, but if you sat down to work out how you do it, I suspect most people would think, my kid fell on his head from a swing last week, who -the-fuck-am-I to tell others how to do it?

Yes, my kid prefers They Might Be Giants, Elvis Costello and The Ramones to Raffi. Yes, my kid walks around the house pretending to be Yo Yo Ma instead of Barney the Phallic Dinosaur. Yes, my child wore a onesie that read “Bored Marxist”. Yes, I walked around  in parade boots, ironic t-shirts and long hair with him strapped to my chest in a harness. But does any of this make me a better parent? Even in the eyes of my peers? These things are incidental products of the life I’m creating, the bargain of existence between my son and wife and I, not some prescription for success that allows me to keep my “cool” (of which I have always been sadly in short supply) as though it were some kind of inheritance I could pass on to the boy.

And what’s the point of teaching a kid what’s cool right now, anyway? It won’t be cool by the time he “needs” it. And he won’t want your cool because you’ve already used it. Cool can’t become a hand-me-down, like a knitted sweater with reindeer on it.

Let him be a kid. Kids are geeks. They’re nerdy, smelly little annoyances who can astonish with insight and melt you with love. If you’re not looking at your kid sometimes wondering whether he’s going to get the snot pummelled out of him by the kinds of kids who did it to you, I suggest you’re doing something wrong. (Ever seen that picture of Kurt Cobain from gradeschool? He was getting his face shoved in the snow by the cool kids, guaranteed.

Teach your kid how to think for himself and remain independent from the pack while navigating within it, and “cool” will follow (though they’ll call it something else by then — maybe “skrack” or something). Teach him how to follow trends and all he’ll end up with is a bunch of hip t-shirts and magazine subscriptions.

PlEs shUt me. Id rthr rub my Is on a chEs gr8tr thn rEd this.

A man who police say confessed to inciting last week’s murder of the journalist Hrant Dink shouted what appeared to be a threat against Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk.”Orhan Pamuk, be smart! Be smart!” Yasin Hayal shouted to reporters as he was being brought to an Istanbul courtroom with his hands cuffed behind his back on Wednesday. Police quickly pressed Hayal’s head down to silence him and led him away.

One wonders whether there isn’t already some psycho out there carrying around a picture of Pamuk, much as Dink’s killer did for months before gunning him down. Sick, twisted set of affairs, that.

Stephen King has finally found the perfect form for his work. Comics. This isn’t to denigrate comics or King — but think about it. Could The Dark Tower have been better written for any other medium? It’ll make so much more sense as a comic.

The recent resurgance in adventure books for boys has some concerned about recycling out-of-date politics and behaviour models for our younger males who might be struggling to be one step better than their dads.

The reinvention of the “boys’ own adventure” genre for the 21st century seems to have taken the media by storm. It has the hazy glow of nostalgia for a simpler world, a world where everyone knew their place in the white, male playground. Problem is, that world no longer exists, if it ever did, and in reinventing the ripping yarn genre (whose most enduring example is Biggles), some of the problems of the original have reappeared. Beneath the surface are racial tension and xenophobia, cultural traits that were institutionalised during the colonial era.

We are offering up a fast food menu of impoverished stereotypes to our sons, based on rigid class systems and exclusion. The thought of filling 21st century boyhood with the same stale old guff on evil foreigners and government-sanctioned assassins makes me feel tired and more than a bit concerned.

This is a scary and thrilling time to be male and I can’t help but think we are shortchanging our sons. The new millennium has seen the unravelling of old, obsolete male values, and good riddance to them, too. Men have come to realise that we need new ways of being male if we are to negotiate the contemporary world of globalisation. Why do we feel the need to inflict our own nostalgia and wishful thinking on our children?

You had me until the word “globalisation”, which reads like a convenient buzzword space-filler after “world of” rather than any rationally thought out argument. Otherwise, I’m with you, brother. And to answer your last question, because we’ve never again been as powerful as that time we captured those enemy agent kids from two streets over and held them hostage at stick point until HQ called and said it was dinner time.

The Writers’ Union of Canada exerts is massive influence and releases the full extent of its power as a “union” with a strongly-worded statement condemning the Supreme Court’s decision against Little Sisters.

I’m sure they’re voting on a strike motion, even as I type. Supreme Court and Stephen Harper quail. If we’re lucky, they may think to tack on a rider increasing our job security and the value of our pension plan, while negotiating our next contract with the Canadian people. It’d be a welcome addition to the newsletters and social opportunities. (Thanks, F)

The NYT examines the human tendency to believe in magic. You know, like all powerful entities that control every aspect of our lives and demand fealty like a cosmicly stern patrician policeman with a feudalism fetish.

Psychologists and anthropologists have typically turned to faith healers, tribal cultures or New Age spiritualists to study the underpinnings of belief in superstition or magical powers. Yet they could just as well have examined their own neighbors, lab assistants or even some fellow scientists. New research demonstrates that habits of so-called magical thinking — the belief, for instance, that wishing harm on a loathed colleague or relative might make him sick — are far more common than people acknowledge.

These habits have little to do with religious faith, which is much more complex because it involves large questions of morality, community and history. But magical thinking underlies a vast, often unseen universe of small rituals that accompany people through every waking hour of a day.

The appetite for such beliefs appears to be rooted in the circuitry of the brain, and for good reason. The sense of having special powers buoys people in threatening situations, and helps soothe everyday fears and ward off mental distress. In excess, it can lead to compulsive or delusional behavior. This emerging portrait of magical thinking helps explain why people who fashion themselves skeptics cling to odd rituals that seem to make no sense, and how apparently harmless superstition may become disabling.
…
Yet in a series of experiments published last summer, psychologists at Princeton and Harvard showed how easy it was to elicit magical thinking in well-educated young adults.

The title of the NYT piece makes me think of that Muppet Show spot with Crystal Gayle where all the ghostly muppets are flying around and shit.  That episode can creep the fuck out of a six year old, what with its scary, mechanical creatures. Not to mention the muppets.

Goes to veteren and newbie.

The two most prestigious awards for American children’s books went yesterday to Susan Patron, a relatively unknown author who was awarded this year’s Newbery Medal, and to David Wiesner, an illustrator who won the Caldecott Medal for the third time.

Patron won for “The Higher Power of Lucky,” the story of a motherless 10-year-old in a tiny town in the California desert. Her win “was a big surprise to everyone, including me,” she said, because it “wasn’t a very splashy book” and “wasn’t talked about in the field.”

I guess they just don’t know how to be a family down there, do they?

Polish journalist and author, dead at 74.

Stephen Henighan, what exactly are you saying here? State yourself plainly, man, rather than all this beating around the bush. Out with it.

As soon as Atwood stood up to introduce the fifth shortlisted author, Vincent Lam, anyone who understood power in Canadian culture knew that Lam had won. Margaret Atwood does not introduce losers. By placing her authority behind Lam, she was giving the equivalent of el dedazo, the crook of the finger with which a Mexican president signals his successor. The image was so powerful that the next day’s Globe and Mail misreported the event, stating that Lam had received his Giller Prize from Atwood when, like every previous winner, he was handed his cheque by Jack Rabinovitch, founder of the prize. But in political terms, the Globe’s initial report—later retracted—was accurate.

The peculiarly Canadian feature of Atwood’s intervention was her astonishing decision to tell in public the story of how Lam had approached her to read his manuscript while working as the ship’s doctor on an Arctic cruise on which Atwood was a passenger. The Family Compact takes for granted that advertising pre-existing links between old and new members of the establishment legitimizes the next generation in the eyes of the public. Our bourgeoisie, being weaker than that of other Western countries, must assert its cohesiveness in public. … In an instant Vincent Lam…became a member of the Family Compact and a potential teddy bear.

Oh. Well, yes, that is quite plain. But I’m glad to see you’ve found a positive aspect to it all — the teddy bear angle for our big, happy family.

Vanity Fair got their paws on a copy of OJ’s book and says it’s no work of literature. Warning, big pics of both OJ and Regan. Could cause permantent psychological scarring and retinal damage.

If I Did It closes before we get to the trial, thank God, because who wants to go through that circus shit again? As it is, If I Did It betrays a slightly faded rustle, the names of its once everyday-news cast of characters—Faye Resnick, Al Cowlings, Robert Kardashian—jogging the memory like those of the bit players in the Watergate saga, without any clear pictures of who they were forming in the mind. It is a book out of which no one comes off well, its real-life clichéd characters clattering like empty bottles.

I shudder. Self-proclaimed bookninja fan Kerry delurks to tip this tidbit of disturbing news (fourth item) about a publisher who will be (trash) compacting the classics:

Despite the trend for new-look classics lists, no publisher has dared to meddle with the texts – until now. Weidenfeld & Nicolson is to launch a list of edited literary classics, called Compact Editions. It claims that market research shows many readers are put off by the “elitist” image of classics and by their daunting length and small print. So the Compact Editions – slogan “Great Books in Half the Time” – have been “sympathetically edited” down to fewer than 400 pages each. Weidenfeld insists that the novels retain the core plot, characters and historical background. The first six titles – Anna Karenina, Vanity Fair, David Copperfield, The Mill on the Floss, Moby-Dick and Wives and Daughters – are to be released in May and will doubtless be snapped up by students eager to cut down their reading time.

Author Jenny Ditski comments on her blog:

Who are these people who want to read scapelled classics?  They are very, very busy, but they’re just as entitled to feel cultured as anyone.  For some reason (a hangover from their grandparents’ education perhaps) they want to be able to say that they’ve read the classics, but they don’t want actually to read them.  A novel’s just a story, isn’t it?  Just the gist, please, I’m busy, very, very busy.  It’s odd, this: a long book of say 800 pages is the same as two gutted books of 400 pages each.  So they’re in a hurry to get as many titles under their belts as possible, and sod the structure, subplots and descriptive stuff.  Leave out the complexity.  This  creates a new definition of well read.  She read not wisely but too much.

A highschool librarian in the US writes about his increasingly more difficult role in the intellectual lives of his students.

I recently spoke with a junior who was stressed about her decreasing ability to focus on anything for longer than two minutes or so. I tried to inspire her by talking about the importance of reading as a way to train the brain. I told her that a good reader develops the same powers of concentration that an athlete or a Buddhist would employ in sport or meditation. “A lot out there is conspiring to distract you,” I said.

She rolled her eyes. “That’s your opinion about books. It doesn’t make it true.” To her, the idea that reading might benefit the mind was, well, lame.

Ah, the intersection of apathy and ignorance. The main drag in the neighbourhood of the teenage superiority complex. She’ll make a fine eLever-puller or iGauge-monitorer in the cyberfactory workplaces of the future.

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